Replacing all hard drives / backing up and restoring volume

[Eric Blau]

Hi folks,

I set up a 4 x 500 GB mirrored volume for a total capacity of ~1 TB a while ago. I've quickly run out of drive space and have ordered 6 x 4 TB drives intended to be set up with RAIDZ2.

I've created a local replication task through the FreeNAS GUI and backed up the 1 TB volume to an external 2 TB USB drive. This worked nicely and I can see the backup volume and all the replicated contents on the USB drive.

My question is, when I remove the 4 x 500 GB disks and replace them with the new RAIDZ2 volume I intend to create, is there anything special I need to worry about or do? Is it as simple as setting up another replication task or doing a zfs send / receive? Any gotchas to watch out for?

I want to keep the jails and plugins I have configured and move them to the new RAIDZ2 system dataset. I intend to keep the existing mirrors USB sticks that I use to boot FreeNAS from. Just trying to figure out if I'm overlooking anything before I do this.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Regards,
Eric

 

[cyberjock]

So long as the old and new zpool has the same name, you keep your config file (don't try to go with a "fresh" install with a "fresh" config file), you should be able to simply replicate the data from your external USB drive to your new zpool and all will "just work". ;)

 

[Eric Blau]

Thanks for the confirmation. I tried this a few days ago and it worked out great. I kept the same name for the zpool and things worked just fine.

The only wrinkle that tricked me up for a bit was that the replication job from the backup back to the new zpool could not be added successfully at first. It complained about using the system dataset pool as the replication destination and refused to allow me to add the job. I updated the system dataset to move it to the mirrored USB sticks and was able to add the replication job successfully afterward.

Once the replication job from the backup to the new zpool was complete, I moved the system dataset back to the original zpool name (now the new, larger RAIDZ2 zpool) and booted into a boot environment that I created before replacing the original zpool.

All-in-all, it went very smoothly. I've got everything back the way is was, only now with ~14 TB of usable space instead of 1 TB.

Thanks again for your reply.

Regards,
Eric